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Bruschetta al Pomodoro

Monday, September 21, 2009

It's the simple things that tend to be the most enjoyable in life. Such is the case for bruschetta. With only 4 main ingredients - plump ruby red tomatoes, fragrant sweet basil, delicate extra virgin olive oil and crusty Italian bread - this is simplicity at it's finest. The key is the ratio of these ingredients to create Bruschetta al Pomodoro.

The following recipe is found the the book, America's Most Wanted Recipes by Ron Douglas. Friends and I tested this recipe to see how it measures up to previous bruschetta we've had at other restaurants including Olive Garden. We even compared the recipe to what was reflected on the Olive Garden website. The results? It was perfect. The balance of tomatoes to basil to extra virgin olive oil was spot on... assuming the Italian bread was cut into nice thick slices. This was definitely one of our favorite recipes we created and probably exceeded our expectations!

Ron Douglas claims he created these recipes through trial-and-error, however most of this book is plagiarized from other sources including the Top Secret Recipes books by Todd Wilbur, The Panera Bread Cookbook, Welcome to Junior's (cheesecake recipe), California Pizza Kitchen Cookbook, Bennigan's Escape from Everyday Cookbook, and many other sources from the Internet. Most of the recipes in this book were created long before he ever started selling his first e-book in 2003. He never gives the original authors the credit they deserve, he falsely claims in television interviews (ABC News Now, Fox) that specific recipes created by these other authors took him anywhere from 2 to 6 months to create. We should not support such dishonesty. It's not fair to the hard-working authors who spend time and money creating this material from scratch.